deuxlits

…and we’re back! in school that is.

today was the first day of classes, as ucla is on the quarter system, and it was such a treat to be back on campus, seeing the gaggle of freshmen  roaming around. after the initial confusion and overload of my first year, i’m wholly excited to start the second round and delve more deeply into the ideas i’ve been toying with so far. i was back in san francisco last week visiting friends and someone asked me “how’s school going?” i stopped to think for a second, beamed, and replied “it’s going great!” that’s not to say that there aren’t frustrations, but after having taking time off from academia for several years, being back in this environment feels like being  a kid in a candy store…albeit with many more deadlines and insecurities.

those of you who know me, know that i have struggled quite a bit: panicking about tight deadlines, getting a slightly (ahem) neurotic about my abilities for innovative ideas but no matter what i’ve always been able to genuinely appreciate the fact that this is a time of experimentation and curiosity. during bitchfests with other students, i think it’s easy to forget why and how we ended up here in the process. i’ve known of other students who go through this whole process with tunnel vision, fixated on hyper-specific tasks and goals and my heart always sinks a little only because i really do feel really lucky and privileged to be an academia where we have the freedom and choice to make of it what we will. perhaps for most people this kind of freedom can be paralyzing, but i sincerely believe that academia is one of the last places where you’re encouraged to think creatively and wrestle with difficult questions. it’s true that the bureaucratic elements can be ghastly and i have yet to contend with the challenges with being a professor and the pressures of tenureship, but i’m really enjoying this time where i’ve been able to carve out space for myself to just try things out. it’s pretty damn fun.

a professor once complained to me that nowadays, people forget that education was in large part an experience rather than just a process of information delivery and i’ve taken this statement to heart. in the near future, i will have to start conceptually committing myself which seems so difficult to do when i’m so genuinely curious so many varied aspects of everyday digital life. part of me resists this only because it smacks of academia’s insistence on boundary demarcation. i know that i can’t just play like this forever but so for the time being i’m just going to stay in my candy store frame of mind until i really have to.

this was a comment i got quite a bit in elementary and junior high school. when i think back on it, i can recall specific topics and teachers that just didn’t click for me for whatever reason. i remember staring at the carbon copy of my report card, usually in some starchy pink or yellow color, trying to decipher my teacher’s penmanship and being complete befuddled: how did they even know what the heck my potential was?! i certainly had no clue as an  8 year old. did this mean i was doing well? did this mean that i was doing poorly? i was getting straight As so what were they talking about????? now, in hindsight i have a better understanding of this. these teachers were telling me that i was doing fine, but that somehow i was capable of more. but just what this “more” is continues to be evasive.

recently, i started asking fellow students, teachers, advisors here at school “at what point do you know you’re good?” in grade school you have little spaces in your report card for teachers to write things like “does not work up to potential.” however, in grad school, i find myself running into this same notion, albeit in an altogether different context. at this current stage, it’s hard to get a sense of what it means to do well in grad school. so far, i’ve found that a lot of the things that really matter happen outside of coursework. the most interesting and compelling growth and development extend beyond the boundaries of the official paperwork that gets shuffled around and this can be a source of anxiety for me, only because it’s fuzzy and unclear to me if i’m really making any kind of progress.

often, when i’ve expressed this to other classmates, i’m met with a “don’t worry!” which is sooooo exasperating. it’s not that i’m worried about failing, or that i’m worried about not making it (whatever that means). i’m really just generally worried about not sucking. but not sucking on *my* own terms. while in grade school, teachers may have had a sense of what my potential was, there’s no one now really telling me where that point of demarcation is. and obviously, there isn’t one. however, the ability to establish  a grounded sense for myself has be constantly reflecting on whether or not i’m moving in the direction where i want to go. this whole process seems to involve a lot of intellectual ambulation, which can be really exhausting and straining. but i think this is just the nature of being in an interdisciplinary environment. there are no well trodden paths. nothing is linear. there are potentials at every intersection and possibilities of intersections across disparate planes. it’s mind-boggling to try and play with connecting the dots all the time.

when i’m feeling tired, i just wish someone would just tell me what to do. most of the time though, i relish in the messiness of it. however, it’s all beginning to dawn on me just how challenging this process of inter- and cross-connecting really is.

i have not posted in gajillion years as i have been completely snowed under by deadlines. technically this is my spring break, but damn —my plate is full. i guess i’m just gorging at the deadline buffet and my eyes are bigger than my stomach. i seem to have this problem of not being able to say “NO.” there are so many exciting projects and ideas and as a interdisciplinary scholar, it’s a real challenge to maintain some sense of core and center when i see nothing but connections everywhere. so a lot of these deadlines are part of this early phase of trying to establish serious intellectual bridges across seemingly disparate bodies of subjects which only contributes to that “headless chicken” feeling that i get more often than i would like. i had already told myself after my experiences from last quarter that i wasn’t going to do any travel this quarter as i was starting to feel that i really needed to buckle down and do some “serious” work and thankfully, i’ve kept true to that promise. however, these past two weeks have brought on new challenges where i find myself voyaging across different intellectual domains and trying to keep it coherent at the same time: from venturing across musical metaphors of improvisation and performance, to more systems-oriented ideas of information flow, to sociological frameworks of structure and agency it’s quite a challenge. and i know i’m not the only one having to contend with this kind of ambiguity. i wish there was some kind of resource for those of us engaging in interdisciplinary work. like some kind of one stop shop, just to trade stories, or advice as to how to build bridges across these displaced nodes in the network…but maybe that’s something that we all have to do individually.